The Greatest Ever Panel on the World's Most Important Market

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1:48hello and welcome to a very special episode of the all thoughts podcast i'm tracy alloway and i'm Joe Wiesenthal. So what you are about to hear has the very, very modest title of the best ever panel on the world's most important market. That is the U.S. Treasury market, of course. This was recorded live at our New York event on June 26th. That's right. We had our recent Odd Lots live event in New York, and there's so much going on in the Treasury markets. There's questions about rates. There's questions about foreign demand. There's questions about liquidity and the capacity of existing treasury market infrastructure to handle all of the volume of debt out there.

2:27So we wanted together some of our favorite people to actually understand what's going on. Yep. Who's going to buy all the bonds? And we did indeed have an absolutely amazing panel. So we had Nellie Lang. She is a senior fellow over at the Brookings Institution. She is also the former undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance. We had Ira Jersey, who you might remember from a previous episode. He is the chief U.S. interest rate strategist over at Bloomberg Intelligence. And finally, we had an odd lots favorite, Josh Younger. He is a lecturer at Columbia University, among many other things.

3:02So we hope you enjoy. Take a listen. So is anyone worried about who's going to buy the debt? Who goes first for that one? Well, I mean, I guess I'll start. I'm not worried about who's going to buy the debt. You know, when we think about markets generally, and especially markets for sovereign debt of large countries that are relatively liquid, there will be a buyer. Now, the price might change. And I think that's one of the things we have seen somewhat in recent weeks when you have somewhat of a slowing economy in the US. You certainly see like two-year yields have actually gone down, you know, better part of 50 basis points over the near term.

3:45But the long end hasn't done very much at all. And I think that that is, at least in part, an indication that there are some people who are a little bit scared to buy that debt without having some type of premium put onto it. So it'll get bought. The question is, at what price? And that's different, right? Like, I'm an investment strategist. I'm not a policymaker, right? And I think that there's some people who kind of mess that up with what our job is. When Nellie was at the Treasury Department, she had a much different view of the world that she had to do as opposed to what we do as investors.

4:18Well, I mean, on that note, it is true that we have more, I would say, price-sensitive buyers in the market than we used to, right? So we used to have a lot of central banks, a lot of sovereign wealth funds. They're still there. But compared to domestic buyers, retail, that has grown a lot more. Nellie, does that change the way you think about debt versus some years ago? Absolutely. So you said prices will adjust. There will be a buyer. But it used to be decades ago, we just had a much more stable investor base, central banks, foreign funds. Now it's like the non-bank, what we would call the non-bank financial institutions.

5:00It's hedge funds for various reasons, private funds who use treasuries for liquidity risk management. So the minute things get volatile, they'll want to sell treasuries to help manage their own positions. And so the investor base has changed. There will be buyers, but it could change the price and change the way prices fluctuate. You know, there's just going to be much more volatility given the changing investor base. And that's something that Treasury, who has to issue the debt regularly, we, when I was at Treasury, probably 250 auctions a year, they think about that. And it does affect how you think about bills versus longer-term coupons and all that.

5:46I guess I would definitely say the same thing. I should start with, I thought I'd get away from disclaimers when I left the Fed, but I have to say a disclaimer, which is this is not investment advice. There's no escape. That has lots of positions and nothing I say should implicate which positions we may have or not have. That said. I think it's a similar way to ask the question is, why are they buying the debt? Because the market's going to clear at a price. We may or may not like that price, but prices used to fluctuate like all over time for various reasons. I mean, during the Civil War, we had a captive demand base because if you wanted to be a bank, you had to buy treasuries.

6:23And yet the price moved, right? And so for me, it's, are you buying a security to hedge a liability that is of similar duration to the thing you're buying? Are you in it for the long haul? And a classic example is like a life insurance company, which has very long-term longevity indexed, is the term of art, right? It's like, as long as you people are alive, there's going to be life insurance companies that have to buy debt of similar length, and they're going to be very stable. They might be price sensitive, but probably less so. And at the end of the day, they have this liability that has to get funded.

6:54Banks, to the same extent, have these very long-term liabilities. Deposits are long-term liabilities. We talked about that on one of the episodes. So they need long-term assets to hedge the long-term liabilities because you have bank accounts. You can get your money back whenever you want, but you tend not to. So that's a long-term liability. A hedge fund is not in it for 10 years because that is not the nature of the business. They are responding to price signals. And relative value treasury trading is really just a response to price signals where the market is attempting to find the lowest cost buyer.

7:25There's this great book from the 19th century, which is inspiration for Friedman. And I'm not a Freeman Knight, but it's an interesting story, which is called Feeding Paris, which is by Bastiat and a French economist. And he was saying if one person was responsible for feeding Paris, everyone would die. Because it's impossible to feed a million people if you're making all these decisions on your own. So price signals get the food to where it has to go, when it has to go there. And so the miracle of the price mechanism is the fact that Paris wakes up every morning and has food to eat. And it's still true.

7:53I mean, cities are complicated. And so in the Treasury market case, the feeding Paris equivalent is basis trades and swap spread trades and every instance of buying a security with levered money, repo and things like that, and hedging the risk with the derivative where the price difference between those things makes that worthwhile. And that's also a signal that we don't have enough of those liability hedgers who are in it for the long haul. We have to find somebody else. What are the data points we should be looking at? Because if I look at the 10-year yield, it's something to do with the long-term trajectory of monetary policy, and that's going to fluctuate for various reasons, inflation growth, etc.

8:32If we want to capture some of these other dynamics, such as the change in who are the buyers, just the desire to even own U.S. dollar-denominated debt assets, what else should we be looking at? Well, so the way that I look at U.S. Treasuries, assuming that there's not real credit risk, right? I would still argue that there's still not credit risk more than a couple of basis points that's embedded in the current yield of, say, the 10-year Treasury. Then 10-year Treasuries, again, the way that I look at it, it has to be somewhere around nominal GDP growth, right? So basically at the trajectory of what is the growth rate of the country in the longer run, and that's what the market is going to spit out.

9:13plus or minus, like you said, some kind of liquidity or either premium or discount. Now, I would argue that with treasuries, to Josh's point right there, is that markets that have deep liquid funding markets, deep liquid derivatives markets, in order for someone to hedge that risk, you tend to get better outcomes and lower yields because of that. So, you know, we did a study. I actually, when I was back at Credit Suisse, I did something actually for a World Bank study about what is liquidity in just about every single OECD government bond market in the world. And what you determined is bid offers were tightest when you had deep and liquid funding markets like repo and when you had derivative markets.

9:55So you look at Italy that basically didn't have a derivative market that was particularly deep and liquid versus a France, which did, and a Spain that did actually. So Spanish spreads were actually tighter than Italian spreads. Not that the yield levels might have been the same, but the difference is those deep liquid like ancillary markets around things matter. And that's where the U.S. is unlike any other country in the world, because we have all of those things in abundance that very few other markets have. And I think that's one reason why it's going to be difficult for people not to be involved with treasuries, either as a liability management tool or as a trading instrument.

10:35it. Well, Nellie, please. I was just going to add, I think just to emphasize, you know, it is long term, how to think about yields, long term nominal GDP growth. But there's a lot of uncertainty about that growth. And that comes in, you know, that fluctuates. And so if you're uncertain about inflation, even if you have an expected path of inflation, if it's high, it might be more volatile. Or if you're uncertain about policies, any kind of policy, either, whether you're going to support the dollar or you're going to support the US as a safe haven, or you're going to support debt or try to reduce debt.

11:14That adds uncertainty. So then Treasuries, like in long, long run, it is nominal GDP. But in the meantime, you're kind of going to fluctuate with these, we call premiums or discounts, depending on how much uncertainty there is about that. I tend to think there's a fair amount of uncertainty about that right now. Can you convince Joe that there is such a thing as the term premium? Well, yes, because if you define term premium as the expectations hypothesis, less whatever the current yield is, there's a residual, and that is a term premium. And you just try to define, you try to use things you know about to explain the residual.

11:58But there's always something left. And that, to me, is a term premium, empirically. Empirically. I don't know if I'm going to convince you. I think I called it on Bloomberg Radio, actually, I called it the dark matter of the treasury market, right? That term premium must exist. The question is, do we measure it properly, right? And that's the art of it as opposed to the science of term premiums. So I like the easiest possible way to do this, which is just to ask people what they think short rates are going to be over the long run. Yeah. And what long-term rates are going to be tomorrow. And the Philly Fed does this every quarter.

12:32And there is a term. Who does this every quarter? The Philly Fed. Okay, say more. So they just ask economists to make predictions as to what they think this, that, or the other thing are going to do. And there's like inflation and GDP growth and all these other things. But once a year, I think the first quarter, so we probably get that either now or soon, they ask 10-year average T-bill yields. And then they also ask about the tenure yield. And so you're just literally asking people. There's a lot of bells and whistles you can put on these models. And some of the models with bells and whistles incorporate the survey data.

12:58Some people just look only at the survey data. Some people do just the modeling. But in all these cases, there's a residual. Doesn't mean it's positive is the really key thing. Term premium can be negative. You can see why I'm unsatisfied. Yeah. Like this is the thing. There's dark matter. They ask these surveys. Yeah. Which doesn't really, like, they ask a random survey. Sometimes it gets negative. Like, you can see why, like, I'm skeptical. Like, I'm not totally satisfied by any of this. No offense. But there's a difference between the two-year yield and the 10-year yield. So, therefore, that difference.

13:32Also true. No, that could be the expectations of rates between two and 10-year. But you can write down what you think or a survey of what you think is between the two and 10. And there's usually a residual left. and can be positive or negative. And having dealt with... And it can often be explained, correlated with things like inflation expectations or other kinds of uncertainty. I can tell you from experience with both dark matter and term premium. Oh, yeah. Josh was an actual astrophysicist. Both deeply unsatisfying. What's dark matter in the, from the physics perspective? Well, we don't know what it is.

14:10We just know it's there. There were attempts to explain it away in various, like, trying to hang on to the old way we think about the world is full of stuff that we can touch and see yeah but those never worked and there's just too much of it um and now don't give me a start on dark energy which is the opposite right and so i i worked for uh for someone at hopkins years ago who for his phd thesis he was told to confirm other experiments to measure the size and shape of the universe and part of that was weighing it and so he did that experiment using supernovae which is a different way to do there's lots of different ways to do things got a negative number Super unsatisfying.

14:44Negative mass density of the universe, which immediately you'd say like, okay, well, this was a waste. Why did I spend two years doing this? Instead, he ran with it. And it turned out it was super real. And he got a Nobel Prize from that outcome, which I'm not saying will come from term premium. But sometimes the deeply unsatisfying thing is the more you dig into it, the more it's real. And I think that any way you slice that information, either literally asking people or trying to model what the market's telling you in some super sophisticated way, you always come up with a residual. Now, the question is, what is that term premium telling you?

15:15And can you find consistent ways to measure it and track it? And this positive and negative thing is clearly the case. And, you know, there's different microeconomic ways to explain why that should or should not be true. It really comes down to uncertainty. So, and is the uncertainty correlated with yields? So if I don't know what's going to happen in the future to the economy, is that uncertainty greater or lesser when rates go up or down? And that naturally generates these dislocations.

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17:52Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. Member FDIC. Copyright 2025. JPMorgan Chase and Company. Can you talk about the existence of something else which is bond vigilantes. So we just heard Taleb talk about the deficit. And yet I feel like the notion that there are investors that, you know, wake up one morning and say, oh, wait, I'm really worried about the deficit. Today's the day I'm going to, you know, sell all my bond exposure. That probably doesn't happen that often. And then secondly, Nellie, I would be very interested in your take on this. But, you know, when you were at Treasury, did you sit in the office going like, oh, the bond vigilantes are going to get me.

18:32I better be disciplined with my issuance schedule. Was that a question for me? For everyone. Okay. Well, let me just, no, I didn't sit there with that. And I was at the Fed for 30 years before I went to Treasury. And you do care a lot about bond yields. I mean, it's sort of fundamental to the way monetary policy works. It's fundamental to the way you issue Treasury. But you don't think about it on a daily basis. But it really influences how you view events, like these scarce events. And if these like, you know, shocks that you weren't, which by definition you're not expecting. But if you've got a system where there's a lot of leverage and you have an unexpected shock, people are going to make trades and change positions.

19:24And that's when you worry. But it's not an ongoing thing. So those kinds of, to sort of prevent that, you spend a lot of time as a policymaker. Where do we understand where the leverage is and how can we keep it manageable and make sure they can keep their funding? This gets to the point of funding being, you know, fundamental to being able to trade treasuries. So it's kind of a bigger picture, but it's not a daily thing. I don't, but it's important. I actually think it's a really important market disciplining. mechanism. Yeah, the level of debt matters, right? So the bod finjolante is like, there's no group of people who get together at a bar and say, hey, we're going to go sell treasuries.

20:07Today's the day. Yeah, exactly. Like, hey, tomorrow, you know, the debt is going to be too big. Let's just sell treasuries. The issue, I think, manifests itself in multiple ways. And one is this steepening of the yield curve that we've seen, right? In a normal environment, you'd expect that anyway, if the Federal Reserve was expected to cut rates, which it certainly has. But at the same time, you do have a growing fear that when you have$2 trillion,$2.5 trillion deficits every year, and we wind up in a debt trap where interest rates and the interest on the debt ends up being so large that the fiscal agents in Washington will have to do something about it.

20:47But the market hasn't yet forced them into it. And I think that forcing the government to actually act and do something is really what might have to be the impetus for you to actually get some kind of fiscal response. The challenge is political, right? And that is because 50-plus percent of our spending by the federal government is Medicare, Social Security, and interest on the debt. Well, those are hard things to contend with, right? It's really, really difficult. I believe in bond vigilantes. It's not in a U.S. context. And what I mean by that is when we talk about bond vigilantes, we're really referring to the 90s EM crisis, where the concern was, I'm not going to get my dollar.

21:33They were dollar bonds. I'm not going to get these dollars back because the counterparty to this debt doesn't have them and can't get them at a reasonable price. And so the bond will default. And therefore, I want to get ahead of this default because, you know, the classic bank run, I want to get out before everyone else is before I'm stuck. In the U.S. context, you don't have that problem. So the question is, who's going to wake up and sell and why? I'm saying why again. And they will sell because they are forced to sell. And we've had the repo vigilantes, so to speak, strike in 2020 and in 2025.

22:03And they were forced to sell for a variety of reasons. One was just the increase in the volatility of the market in general. And then there were margin calls, especially in 2020, where they were de-levered. And the question then becomes like, are we heading for that kind of scenario? And the reason why the debt growth matters is because these repo vigilantes are not worried about the credit of the bonds they hold. They're worried no one will buy them from them because the banking system or the bank-affiliated dealers that are supposed to be on the other side of these trades won't have capacity.

22:36And every trade is going to keep ticking cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. and they're going to be in a difficult mark-to-market situation. But that's a very different set of considerations. And it's sort of related to overall growth in the debt, but it's also related to the structure of the market and how it places it. Since we're here and we're just clarifying things for me that I've always wanted to learn about, for years, over 10 years, I've been sitting at my Bloomberg terminal. Every once in a while, you get a red headline. And it talks about bid to cover and the tail. and I can never tell if any of these auction statistics really make a difference.

23:11Like, oh, terrible auction. And then say, oh, it's a good auction. How should I consume that information? How useful is that? Or for whom is that useful? So we actually started just earlier this year in Bloomberg Intelligence having a grading methodology where we actually grade these from D to A plus. And, you know, we look at a variety of the bidding metrics in order to do that and how they compare to recent history. So one of the big things that you've seen, and this goes to Josh's issues about structure, you go back about 10, 12 years, and you saw that primary dealers were the biggest buyers of coupon debt.

23:51Today, they're the smallest. So you actually, in the recent auctions, for example, that we just had this week, we did a seven-year auction earlier today, we had five-year yesterday. The dealers only bought about 10 % of the bonds, whereas if you went back to 2012, 2013, they would have bought 40 % to 60 % of those auctions. So the bidding metrics matter. And it matters because you can see where the primary demand is coming from. And we know now that dealers, because of the changes in market structure that have occurred, particularly since the institution of Basel III, are much smaller buyers. And basically, end users are much larger buyers.

24:33And some of those are high frequency traders or maybe people who have repo books and kind of need to fill them by getting some collateral. So all of those metrics matter. But the tales will show you that the market was mispriced at the time that the auction closed versus what the aggregate demand was at that auction. And that's that tale is the single most important thing to look at, followed by then some of the details in there about who was actually purchasing and then how much they bid for. So since we brought up market structure, it is true that the treasury market has experienced a number of volatility events at this point, which is weird because in theory, it's supposed to be a pretty boring kind of staid old fashioned market.